Visit Thankfully Over (Reply)

Today I'm headed home, after having flown to Northern Virginia on Monday to see my parents – I came for my dad's 85th birthday. I'm very pleased with the fact that I won't be back until December, and at that time my partner teaotter will be with me, but sadly not my partner amberite. I visited because while I loathe my mother, at this point I pity her about as much (my analogy for her remains one of those exceedingly mean and aggressive cats that has gotten sufficiently old to be far less aggressive and simply pathetic), since my dad has Alzheimer's and is to the point of forgetting what he's saying halfway through a sentence a moderate portion of the time – having any sort of conversation with him is at best difficult and at worst impossible. At this point, all my mom's friends are either dead or live far away, and so my near daily phone calls are pretty much her only lucid human contact most days.

I've never understood my father (who was always an excellent example of repressed 1950s masculinity and thus even more alien to me than my mother), so I don't miss him, but thinking too much about his state is horrifying. I'm fairly certain that his 2 heart attacks brought on by decades of smoking (which he then quit), triple bypass surgery, seemingly mild, but problematic head injury 11 years ago, depression, Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, and 25 years of various heart medicines puts him in a vastly different risk category than me, but thinking about ending up that way is appalling. Thankfully, no other relative of mine has ever had Alzheimer's, and almost tend to live anywhere from their 80s to early 100s while being exceedingly lucid.

In any case, I can't wait to get on a plane and return home to people who I love and surroundings that are not quite so epically grim. Once again, I remain both proud and overjoyed that I deliberately rejected my parents' grasping and greed-drive upper middle class culture as well as their their generally vile ways - while even with being an only child who will inherit their money, I'll never be as wealthy as them, but I have been and will be a hell of a lot happier and with a far larger social circle.